Mougouch Fielding

Mougouch Fielding, who has died aged 92, was a former debutante who became the
wife, muse and, following his death, guardian of the legacy of the
Armenian-born artist Arshile Gorky, a central figure in American art’s shift
towards abstraction.

Mougouch on the beach with Arshile Gorky

6:35PM BST 19 Aug 2013

When she first met Gorky at a party in New York in February 1941, Agnes Magruder was a 19-year-old free spirit who had travelled halfway around the world, worked as a secretary for a Chinese communist organisation and decided to study art. Beautiful and mischievous, with long brown hair, a sensuous mouth and large eyes, her combination of boldness and femininity made her irresistible to men.

It was Gorky’s air of melancholy that attracted her: “This tall, dark man came and sat beside me, and said absolutely nothing,” she recalled. “Then, at the end of the evening, he asked me if I’d have coffee with him.” They went to a coffee shop, and Gorky plied her with so many questions that she emptied her handbag on to the table to give him a picture of who she was. Soon they were seeing each other daily, and he gave her the nickname “Mougouch” — meaning “mighty one” in Armenian, he explained. Before long she had moved into his studio on Union Square.

Towards the end of the year they scandalised her family by getting married in Nevada, on the way back from Gorky’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco, after buying a curtain ring from Woolworths. She was 20; Gorky, who always lied about his age, was probably about 41. After drinking champagne in a bar, they camped in a double sleeping bag in the Sierra Nevada.

They had two daughters, but throughout their seven year-marriage Gorky remained as mysterious to his wife as he had been when she first met him. She claimed that it was only some years after his death that she discovered that his real name was Vosdanik Adoian; that he had been born in an Armenian village in eastern Turkey; that as an adolescent he had witnessed the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, in which up to two million died, including his mother, who starved to death in his arms. In 1920 he and his older sister, Vartoosh, had escaped to the United States, where their father, who had abandoned the family in 1906, was working as a labourer and did not want to know them. Eventually they moved to New York, where Gorky slowly established himself as an artist.

Over the next 20 years he created an almost completely false persona that included an idyllic childhood in Russia (he sometimes claimed to be a Georgian prince); kinship to Maxim Gorky; study under Kandinsky in Paris (a city he had never visited); and a degree in Engineering from Brown University. Mougouch recalled that he never left her alone with his sister — “he didn’t want me to hear her stories” — and he never admitted that his father was still alive. The closest she got to the truth was through his paintings: “Gorky saw things differently from other people. For him, clouds and trees were full of threatening forces. As you walked around with him, you realised what you were seeing was completely different to what he was seeing.”

Their early life together was happy: they spent long periods in the country, mixed with the great artists of their time in New York, struggled to make ends meet and danced on the roof outside their apartment. Their relationship helped spark a new phase in Gorky’s artistic development. After years in which his work was regarded as derivative, he found his own path, capturing the shifting light of his parents-in-law’s farm in Virginia in lyrical semiabstract paintings.

In this he was deeply influenced by the wave of modernists who had arrived in New York to sit out the war, in particular by the Chilean-born Roberto Matta, who encouraged him to experiment with a more spontaneous style. With her contacts in American high society, Mougouch facilitated her husband’s career, charming potential dealers and cooking delicious meals for museum curators.

Yet things were never easy. There were constant worries about money, and Gorky was a possessive husband. Starting in 1946, a cascade of calamities brought him close to breaking point. First his studio burned down with much of his work in it. Then he had an operation for cancer which forced him to use a colostomy bag. He became severely depressed and there were violent episodes. Two years later, on June 17 1948, Mougouch, in desperation, decamped for a two-day fling with Matta, whose indiscretion quickly made the affair common knowledge. “It was perhaps the worst thing I ever did,” she recalled later. “The affair with Matta ruined my life in one zip.”

For a while Gorky said nothing — but another disaster swiftly followed. On June 26 his neck was broken in a car crash and his painting arm was temporarily paralysed. After leaving hospital he began to drink heavily, and one night — furious with Mougouch over her affair — he went on a drunken rampage, breaking up the furniture and flinging her down a flight of stairs. The next day, July 16, Mougouch fled with their daughters to her parents’ home. Five days later Gorky’s body was found in a shed hanging from a beam, on which he had written the words “Goodbye my loveds”. His fabrication of his own life had been so effective that the New York Times headed its report of his suicide “Gorky’s Cousin Ends Life”.

Mougouch remarried — twice (her third husband was the writer and Crete war hero Xan Fielding). Yet Gorky remained a dominant force in her life, and if she had never quite managed to be the ideal artist’s wife, she was his perfect widow. She worked hard to keep his memory (and myth) alive, finding dealers to handle his work and encouraging museums to show and buy it. When the Tate Modern held a spectacular retrospective of his work in 2010, she said: “When I think of Gorky, I think about my life beginning. I rarely think of my life before then. For me, it all began with Gorky.”

Agnes Magruder was born on June 1 1921 in Boston, Massachusetts, into an old Washington family. Her father was a naval attaché (later a commodore), and her mother was descended from the neoclassical sculptor Harriet Hosmer. As her father’s postings took the family around the world, Agnes attended schools in Washington, The Hague and Switzerland. Beautiful and rebellious, when her father was posted to Shanghai in 1940, she spent the night with a young diplomat and advertised her enthusiasm for Chinese communism, leading her parents to pack her off to college in Iowa. From there, she took a bus to Manhattan and enrolled at the Art Students League, only to quit for a typing job at a communist magazine called China Today.

After Gorky’s death she married, in 1949, the Bostonian painter Jack Phillips, with whom she had two daughters. They divorced in 1959, and she subsequently moved to London where, in 1978, she married Xan Fielding. They moved to Andalucia and later Paris, where he died in 1991. Afterwards she returned to London.

Wherever she went, Mougouch attracted friends and admirers. In London she was taken up by the last remaining members of the Bloomsbury Group, including “Bunny” Garnett, Duncan Grant and Frances Partridge, who described her as “the best 'hostess’ I know”. Other admirers included the travel writers Patrick Leigh Fermor, Robin Fedden and Bruce Chatwin.